Peter Y. Sussmanhttp://www.peterysussman.com
Journalist and AuthorWed, 08 Jun 2016 21:41:57 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=Marriage: God’s Rules and Caesar’shttp://www.peterysussman.com/blog/marriage-gods-rules-and-caesars/
http://www.peterysussman.com/blog/marriage-gods-rules-and-caesars/#commentsFri, 03 Jul 2015 23:32:40 +0000Peterhttp://www.peterysussman.com/?p=499With the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, I have been unearthing some of my writings on the subject over the years, many of them emphasizing a common theme: the way some religious people confuse civil and religious institutions. I’ve previously posted on this website a 2009 blog on the subject. I now add this oped, syndicated by Pacific News Service in 2004, soon after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom unilaterally ordered the city staff to issue marriage licenses without regard to gender, setting off a brief, celebratory period during which the city was issuing marriage licenses as the Supreme Court acknowledged 11 years later is constitutionally required.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said it exactly right when he told the media that President Bush “has always strongly believed that marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman.”

Behind the exhilaration of the recent San Francisco gay marriages — or the angst, depending on your viewpoint — lie a few deceptively simple words that we have hopelessly confused. The easiest way to come to terms with the national tempest over gay marriages is to place those few words under a microscope for a moment.The operative words in the White House statement are “sacred” and “believed.” McClellan’s announcement accurately summarizes the president’s religious view that marriage between a man and a woman is a sacred institution, not a governmental one. But what Mr. Bush is proposing is the

President Bush “has always strongly believed that marriage is a sacred institution”

inclusion in the United States Constitution, the ruling document of our secular government, of his personal “beliefs” on what is “sacred.”

Mr. Bush, said to be a deeply religious man who felt a “calling from God” to run for the presidency, is welcome to his beliefs, however exclusionary I may feel they are; but they are between him and his god. They are not part of the contract with the American people that he has pledged to uphold. The president would substitute his personal belief system for the equal protection of all citizens in our diverse nation that has been a cornerstone of our constitutional guarantees for centuries.

That word “sacred” is surely a key to the heart-wrenching political debate in this country over gay marriage; let’s recognize it for what it is — a component of religious belief and therefore laden with emotional import. However, it has nothing to do with the affairs of state except in theocracies.

There is another word whose use and misuse has been equally troubling: the word “marriage” itself.

We have unwittingly combined two institutions under a common name. There is, first, the “marriage” for which one gets a license from the government. The license entitles one to many benefits and responsibilities — corporate, governmental, contractual and otherwise. The absence of such a document can carry civil penalties — in taxation, in court, and in many nongovernmental realms.

Whether governments decide to permit the license to be witnessed or countersigned by a civil official or a religious figure, whether it is used as part of a religious ceremony or not, that convenience does not change the nature of the civil contract itself. The issuance of that license, that municipal document with such important ramifications, was at the center of the action taken dramatically by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s simple directive to his staff.

All races and sexes are entitled under our current Constitution to the full benefits and responsibilities of a “marriage license.” That includes use of the word “marriage,” not a “separate but equal” designation such as “civil unions.”

There is another use of the word “marriage,” however. It is the “marriage made in heaven” — generally consecrated in churches and synagogues and temples. It is a religious act. Most religions have elected to use the government’s

We have unwittingly combined two institutions under a common name.

license as a precondition or part of their rites, but the two are not the same. In a country dedicated to separation of church and state, religions are welcome to use governmental documents such as licenses for their own purposes, but they have no right to insist that we adopt their beliefs or institutions — or their definition of what constitutes “marriage.”

Some religions — or factions of their adherents — have strong views on the meaning and nature of marriage. Some believe that marriage ought to be between a man and a woman; others that it is an institution open to one man and several women; still others that it is open only to adherents of the same religion or race or caste. Except to protect women, children and especially vulnerable people from physical or emotional exploitation, the state has no right to tamper with such purely religious views, as long as they remain purely religious. However benighted and heartless I may consider it, churches may, if they wish, call only man-woman couples “married in the eyes of God.”

For far too many years in our nation’s often ignoble history, those with strong religious or quasi-religious beliefs managed to persuade American governments to deny the secular institution of marriage to people of different races. We have finally come to recognize the horrible historical error of those laws against miscegenation. They have been ruled illegal under the Constitution, and our nation has been enriched immeasurably by the correction of that long-held error.

Now, the president and others are asking us not simply to practice discrimination against a significant class of our citizens; they are asking that we write their “sacred” belief in such discrimination into our most basic charter, which is dedicated to elimination of inequality, not promotion of it.

The president is entitled to believe whatever he wishes in his heart, but we have no more right as citizens of this pluralistic democracy to write “except gays” into the U.S. Constitution than we do “except colored folks.”

]]>http://www.peterysussman.com/blog/marriage-gods-rules-and-caesars/feed/0“Invisible Punishment” chapterhttp://www.peterysussman.com/uncategorized/invisible-punishment-chapter/
http://www.peterysussman.com/uncategorized/invisible-punishment-chapter/#commentsThu, 12 Jun 2014 22:39:29 +0000Peterhttp://www.peterysussman.com/?p=423(As a courtesy, the author requests that any published quotation from this essay cite its source as a chapter in the book “Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment,” edited by Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind and published by The New Press in 2002.)

MEDIA ON PRISONS: CENSORSHIP AND STEREOTYPES

By Peter Y. Sussman

Prisons are surrounded by high walls — walls of concrete and razor wire, of course, but also walls of secrecy and stereotype. The public is protected from whatever physical danger might be presented by prisoners, but it is also “protected,” less legitimately, from the knowledge of what goes on behind those walls. The secretiveness that has come to characterize many of our country’s prison systems hampers the public’s ability to help shape government policy, to correct abuses, to understand crime, to evaluate prison programs and practices and generally to reassess our costly and ineffectual system of criminal justice sanctions.

It is the special role of the news media, guaranteed explicitly by the U.S. Constitution, to operate freely so that governmental officials and institutions, including prisons, may be subjected to public scrutiny. In recent years, the news media have failed to meet their responsibilities to explore fully the operation of prisons. Much of the blame can be placed on government censorship, operating in various overt and covert ways — well before the administration of George W. Bush upped the ante by putting an impenetrable blanket of secrecy over legions of detainees in its notorious terrorism investigation. But the news media themselves must share some of the blame; they have often indulged in distortion and self-censorship in their coverage of crime, prisons and prisoners, sometimes in response to presumed demands of the marketplace.

On the government side of the ledger, the problem may originate with the increasing politicization of prisons. No longer is incarceration an issue of public protection alone. Politicians at national, state and local levels have come to see “criminals” as one of the most effective political weapons in their electoral arsenal. The now infamous television ad with which George Bush Sr. furthered his presidential campaign at the expense of furloughed prisoner Willie Horton was hardly the first time a politician played “the fear card,” but its successful use in that instance undoubtedly helped persuade others of its effectiveness as a powerful advertising tool.

Coming out four-square against criminals is easy pickings; who could object? So in federal races and in state after state, politicians try to out-gun each other in their indignant denunciation of crime and criminals and in their passionate support for ever-longer sentences, sometimes for minor offenses that had been featured briefly on newspaper front pages. Once elected, the politicians must respond to the fears and expectations they generated when campaigning for office. At the federal level, crimes that had formerly been classified as local are “federalized” to fulfill extravagant tough-on-crime campaign pledges by candidates for federal offices. Because of such political dynamics, legislators at all levels “solve” more and more social problems with a single blunt tool: longer prison sentences.

In view of the superheated emotions generated by the electoral uses of crime, any thoughtful attention paid to prisoners themselves — by the news media or the public — becomes a politically charged issue. The shorthand word for such attention is “coddling.” It has become almost fashionable for local penal officials to vie with each other in dreaming up creative new ways to pander to public hysteria by further debasing prisoners and stripping them of their remaining vestiges of personal dignity. Chain gangs, tents in the desert, striped clothing are just a few of the ways in which already dehumanized men and women have been deprived of whatever individuality they had left and of the inner resources that might help them someday to make a go of it on the outside.

In the 1990s, as the politicization of crime increased and the resulting prison population boom began careening out of control, prison and government officials in the United States started tightening up on news media interviews and other contacts between prisoners and journalists — just as they had done in a previous period when prisons became politicized, in the early 1970s. Even in jurisdictions that didn’t tighten access rules for the news media, pre-existing regulations were often murky, leaving interpretation — and media access — to the whim of individual wardens or lower-level officials, many of whom seemed more inclined than formerly to exercise such arbitrary powers — even, or perhaps especially, when journalists’ interest focused on the actions of the very people who were controlling news media access. Prison administrators were granted, or usurped for themselves, a latitude accorded no other government officials to control the coverage of their own activities and misdeeds.

Consider the following examples:

California prison newspaper editor Robert “Boston” Woodard was punished in 1996 for the contents of a letter he wrote openly to a journalist. The charge: “circumventing policies” — policies that didn’t exist in writing at the time he was convicted of “circumventing” them. Regulations issued by California prison authorities months later placed new restrictions on interviews with journalists but would not have prohibited letters such as Woodard’s. In short, the policies he was convicted of circumventing didn’t exist. The prisoner later sued the state Department of Corrections, which elected to settle the suit to the prisoner’s satisfaction after losing several preliminary skirmishes in court.

Two prisoners, Shearwood Fleming and Charles Ervin, were sent to special detention at another California prison, for investigation of “impugning the credibility” of a prison program — a garment manufacturing operation run jointly by a private company and the California prison system. Again, no such infraction is listed in prison regulations. The suspected “impugning” — which could also be thought of as “criticizing” a government program — was accomplished, the charge papers said, “by contacting the news media.” The prisoners were also told that they were being investigated for “a conspiracy to mastermind a sabotage effort to discredit[emphasis added] a joint venture project at this institution” and later were transferred to other prisons because of “the sensitive nature of the Joint Venture [garment manufacturing] Program and a negative impact the news media placed on this program.” That “negative impact” could only have referred to a news report on a San Diego television station, broadcast shortly before Fleming and Ervin were sent to segregation, in which two unnamed prisoners, with voices disguised, said that prisoners in the garment factory had been ordered to remove “Made in Honduras” labels from prefabricated T-shirts and to replace them with “Made in USA” labels.

An attorney for a parolee — no longer incarcerated at the time — named Leslie White was told by California Department of Corrections authorities that he was being denied permission to publish an OpEd essay he wrote that had already been accepted for publication by the Los Angeles Times. In the essay manuscript, which parole authorities insisted on reviewing, White opposed “three strikes” legislation and criticized then-Governor Pete Wilson. The reasons given for the publication denial, which was reversed after White’s attorney threatened legal action, were that the article was “inflammatory” and “not in the best interests of the State.”

All these actions came during a period in the mid-1990s when abuses in the California prison system were the subject of a great deal of press attention and prisoner litigation. Among other issues of legitimate public concern, press attention and litigation had spotlighted the treatment of the mentally ill in the California prison system; severe psychological and physical abuse of prisoners at the “supermax” prison in Pelican Bay; an unprecedented number of incidents in which guards shot prisoners to death at Corcoran state prison; and harsh new criminal penalties such as “three strikes” legislation, passed by the state Legislature and later by the public, in a statewide initiative in 1994.

It was during this same period that the state Department of Corrections issued regulations restricting the ability that journalists had enjoyed during the previous two decades to interview specified prisoners face to face. The new regulations were designed to prevent journalists from conducting one-on-one interviews with willing individual prisoners with the use of cameras, tape recorders or even, for a period of time, pencil and paper. As a result, exposure of abuses was dependent at times on the ability of reporters to gain access to prisoners through subterfuge, through tenuous, monitored phone calls or through “visits” in which they literally tried to memorize prisoners’ comments, in the hopes of recreating portions of the interview later. Following issuance of the regulations, one prison reporter began taking a colleague with him when he visited an inmate, with each trying to memorize the prisoners’ words so they could try to reconstruct key portions of the interview after they ran back to confer in their car in the prison parking lot. Another reporter says he stopped at a nearby coffee shop to try to reconstruct his memories of a critical interview.

Even after the state’s regulations were clarified — under news media pressure — to permit reporters’ use of paper and pencils that they found in the visiting room and that were available to all other visitors, “freelancing” officials, imbued with the secrecy culture that dominates most prisons, tried to do on their own what the Department of Corrections had been persuaded not to do on a statewide basis. One reporter had a pencil and napkins confiscated from him by two guards on the grounds that he wasn’t an ordinary visitor — who would have been entitled to use them — but a journalist conducting an interview and taking notes on the napkins. A guard stood over this journalist for the remaining hour of his interview with a 61-year-old female prisoner. The story the reporter was trying to research concerned an important public issue, the system of parole for prisoners suffering from battered women syndrome. Without access to quotations and details of the woman’s complicated life story, the feature that this reporter ultimately wrote for his readers was “not the story it would have been,” he says. “No way. No way.”

Similar restrictions on interviews were issued in other states, some of them influenced by California’s example. Shortly after a court ruled that Pennsylvania Death Row resident Mumia Abu-Jamal could not be singled out for denial of press interviews, the state’s rules were tightened to restrict in-person interviews with all of the state’s prisoners. Michigan, too, came up with regulations restricting taped interviews with all prisoners. In that state, the regulations were drafted after a court ruled that ABC could not be denied an on-camera interview with a willing interviewee, Jack Kevorkian, at a time when regulations included no prohibitions on such interviews.

Other court cases have involved a prisoner in Idaho who was punished for talking to the news media about an HIV problem at his prison and a North Dakota prisoner who was punished for failing to obtain her warden’s permission prior to telephoning a newspaper reporter. North Dakota prison officials had previously taken no action in response to the woman’s complaint of a sexual assault by a guard. The prison’s media contact rule was repealed as part of the settlement of the prisoner’s subsequent lawsuit.

In state after state, prison officials who have tightened media access to prisoners cite not security concerns as they were once understood but the “celebrity” of prisoners, especially “notorious” prisoners. California prison officials have even established a tighter custody category based on the “notoriety” or “public interest” of prisoners; that is, the fact that the prisoner had generated “extensive attention by the public, media, or lawmakers” was used as justification to place the prisoner in tighter security. The worry was not the security danger per se of the prisoner’s contacts with the news media but the content of the resulting news reports and/or public reactions to them.

The California Department of Corrections justified some of its restrictions on media access by pointing to the need to protect the public — not “physical” protection in the traditional sense, it said, but the “emotional well-being” of victims and others. In short, information that had been available to the public through the press was to be restricted based on the possible emotional impact of whatever the press reported from the prison. Corrections officials thus took it upon themselves to safeguard citizens’ emotional well-being, and they elevated that self-appointed duty above the press’s constitutionally protected right to inform the public on the operation of public institutions.

As Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in an unrelated case: “The First Amendment directs us to be especially skeptical of regulations that seek to keep people in the dark for what the government perceives to be their own good.”

According to the publication Prison Legal News, in a move analogous to California’s, jail officials in Seattle have classified some prisoners as “ultra high security” and isolated them from contact with other prisoners based at least in part on the widespread media attention paid to their offenses — another clear attempt to punish prisoners based on their interest to the press and public.

Prison officials eager to squelch interviews often point to the need to keep prisoners like the oft-cited Charles Manson from gaining undue celebrity outside the prison walls (as if Manson didn’t arrive in prison with a lifetime’s worth of celebrity.) As the California Department of Corrections’ tortured reasoning goes, “Media interviews tend to glamorize crime and criminals by making inmates television ‘stars’ and thus undermine the severity of the penalties designed to deter crime. For example, sales of recordings and Tee-shirts concerning inmate Charles Manson have no doubt been aided by frequent interviews with this inmate.” The department did not provide evidence to substantiate its assertion of a linkage between post-incarceration media interviews and Manson’s celebrity, much less between press interviews and T-shirt sales. Nor did it offer any evidence that the “star” quality of prisoners like Manson undermined criminal penalties that deter crime. Again, the focus of the California Department of Corrections was clearly on the free-world social impact of whatever news stories might be written based on interviews. The graphics on T-shirts worn by non-prisoners would seem to any neutral observer to be far beyond the province of prison custodians.

There’s a further irony in the “celebrity” argument. One prominent prison reporter notes that officials at Corcoran state prison have sometimes gone out of their way to tour visiting journalists through the unit where their famous prisoners are kept. Said the reporter, “They took us by this protective housing unit, which is where all the stars of the system are. There’s Charlie Manson next to Sirhan Sirhan next to Juan Corona. And they take everybody through. And it’s almost like – it reminded me of being at the San Diego Zoo, and they took you by Ling Ling, the panda bears. … They’re just showing off; the prison system is showing off its stars.”

Interview restrictions in many other states are also tied specifically to the presumed content of the ensuing news story. Restrictions on content have long been considered a violation of the Constitution’s free-speech and free-press clauses, but in Connecticut, for example, journalists have been required to include in their written requests for access to prisoners “a statement of any perceived benefit to law enforcement agencies” resulting from the interview. One can surmise that journalists would have a harder time justifying interviews with prisoners who intended to “impugn” or “discredit” prison policies or practices, however corrupt. The Connecticut regulation carries an uncomfortable, Orwellian echo of the ruling that temporarily silenced parolee Leslie White’s expression of political opinions in California: “not in the best interests of the State.”

As part of the California rule-making process, the Department of Corrections characterized news media interviews as “a public forum in which [prisoners] can espouse their often sociopathic philosophies,” as if free-world citizens could not be trusted to hear and evaluate for themselves those “philosophies” that prison administrators chose to characterize as sociopathic. The argument betrays a disturbing distrust of the “marketplace of ideas” assumed by the First Amendment.

Many of the arguments for regulations to restrict interviews with prisoners are based ultimately on the fallacy that the purpose of prison journalism is to serve as a public relations vehicle for prisoners. In fact, journalistic interviews are necessary to assess the truthfulness of prisoner assertions or to elicit new information of public interest, not to simply pass along the self-interested and undigested assertions of a prisoner.

State restrictions on interviews and news coverage bear some rhetorical resemblance to the capricious rules of an autocratic third-world country, although the punishments for violation are not nearly as harsh. Compare them, for example, to the press law of the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the news media are required to back the government’s war efforts. The death penalty is prescribed for “insulting the army” (impugning its credibility?) and “demoralizing the nation” (not in the best interests of the State?). Scratch deep enough, and there’s not much theoretical difference between the concern that news stories might insult the army of the Congo and the requirement that journalists justify that their stories will be a benefit to law enforcement agencies in Connecticut.

Although journalists in this country are not subject to execution for their prison coverage, they are not immune from retaliation by the state. In an attempt to defend itself against a prisoner’s civil rights lawsuit, California subpoenaed all of this writer’s notes and other documents on the issue of media access to prisoners. Before the state capitulated and settled — without receiving the documents it had demanded — efforts were initiated to subpoena my e-mail provider to gain access to my electronic correspondence on the subject matter of this chapter, journalists’ prison coverage. I was subjected to nearly 14 hours of interrogation in depositions, with numerous questions focusing on my political advocacy, the nature of my future publishing plans and the subject matter of past articles. I was asked, for instance, whether I had “written anything for Pacific News Service, whether published or not, regarding then-Governor Wilson” and “what plans” I had to write about the lawsuit’s plaintiff, a prisoner, “in the future.” I was asked, “What is the subject of [my upcoming] book contract?” and “Are you involved in lobbying for or supporting any of that legislation” on inmate-specific interviews in California prisons and “in what capacity” was I “involved in lobbying for or supporting that legislation?”

Restrictions on press access to prisoners tend to be strictest where the resulting news stories could be of greatest public significance. In many states, in-person interviews with death-row prisoners are either forbidden or more restricted than those with other inmates. Such restrictions shut off one of the main vehicles for correcting abuses that have led to the execution of people who may well have been innocent of the crimes for which they were killed. Many other prisoners on death rows across the country have been exonerated perilously close to their execution dates, often through the investigative efforts of the news media. In such last-chance situations, it would seem to be wise public policy — if only to affirm the justice of the legal process — to encourage effective press coverage of potentially irreversible judicial mistakes that carry the direst of consequences. Yet Arizona, for example, orders that no interviews of any kind be permitted with prisoners after they’ve been moved to the “death watch,” 14 days before execution. Other states subject reporters to hurdles in reaching Death Row prisoners that are far more difficult to surmount than the restrictions placed on contact with prisoners in general custody. Is it possible that this higher level of restriction, like so much else that happens in prisons, is based on the increasingly political nature of the death penalty?

A number of high-profile mistakes have underlined the press’s important responsibility to investigate the possibility that the legal system has dispatched innocent people to death row. In November 1998, the National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty at Northwestern University law school was attended by several dozen of the 75 formerly condemned inmates who, in the previous two decades, had been exonerated and released not only from death row but from prison. A little over a year later, when George Ryan, the Republican governor of Illinois, declared a moratorium on executions, that state had exonerated more men on death row than it had executed — an imbalance that has chillingly illustrated the extent of error that has crept into the criminal justice system.

The execution lottery that has led to so many erroneous convictions has been buttressed by new laws and judicial rulings limiting judicial appeals by the condemned. With avenues for judicial review thus constricted, the role of the press is all the more important in righting potentially fatal government mistakes. The news media are, now more than ever before, the court of last resort. With access to prisoners further restricted, the press is not able to be as effective as it must now be in its traditional and vitally important oversight role.

Yet one Virginia prison spokesman told a newspaper in that state, “Prison is not the place for media productions. We are under no obligation to provide a platform for inmates to profess their innocence or make allegations against the prison system.”

Aside from the issue of execution-by-mistake in individual cases, there are many questions about the validity and fairness of the death penalty, with mounting evidence that racial and other extraneous considerations sometimes determine whom the state puts to death and whom it doesn’t. It is vital that the public discuss such life-and-death issues with all the information it can bring to the debate, including information that only the condemned can provide. It is up to the press to fulfill that awesome responsibility, and it ought to be the government’s obligation to facilitate that process.

The problem of wrongful conviction is not confined to those facing the death penalty, of course. Onetime Black Panther Party leader Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt is a celebrated example of a prisoner who was imprisoned for decades on a murder charge before his conviction was overturned because of new evidence. It was confirmed many years after his conviction that the primary witness against Pratt had been a police and FBI informant who lied about that fact under oath and that prosecutors had withheld this critical evidence. After his release, Pratt won a multimillion-dollar settlement of his lawsuit for false imprisonment and violation of civil rights.

Pratt had long maintained that he was punished while in prison for his contacts with reporters who were investigating his claims of innocence. California’s crackdown on in-person media interviews surfaced soon after several investigative reporters began to take a close look at the questionable circumstances leading to Pratt’s conviction. These reporters say that the first prisoner with whom they were denied on-camera interviews was Pratt. Although no one has offered definitive proof, the reporters suspect a direct connection between the renewed press interest in Pratt’s innocence and the more general media restrictions that followed soon thereafter — as well as the official jeremiads against “celebrity prisoners.”

Critical concerns about prison justice go well beyond the validity of death penalty verdicts or other claims of innocence. The routine hostility and brutality of life in many of the nation’s prisons is also a matter of social equity — and certainly is of interest to the U.S. public and government when similar treatment is documented in other countries’ prisons. But beyond that, years-long subjection to the coarse cruelties of everyday life in prison leaves an indelible mark on the people whom we cycle in and out of the prison system and on their families. In this country, a disproportionate number of those people represent racial and ethnic minorities. The harsh, spiteful ways so many people are treated in our prisons degrades the level of our culture generally, even when prisoners don’t emerge so embittered by their experiences that a life of continuing crime and drug abuse seems the only feasible anodyne or “payback.” The public deserves to know about such conditions and understand their consequences while there is still an opportunity to change them.

Other issues of public policy that the press has a responsibility to investigate inside the prisons include sentencing policy. In California, the restrictions on press interviews were instituted at about the time the state enacted one of the country’s harshest “three strikes” laws. Many of those subjected to the 25-years-to-life penalty had committed petty thefts; others had lifelong histories of mental illness or retardation; still others suffered from debilitating drug addictions for which they could get no treatment. Enactment of the “three strikes” legislation was more than an issue of academic public interest. The penalty was presented to the public on a statewide ballot; it was an electoral issue. So the circumstances of the lives and crimes of people facing the penalty were legitimate components of the public decision-making process.

After passage of the California initiative, the effectiveness of that electoral decision — and possible modification of its provisions — continued to be an issue of importance for the voters and legislators of the state. Who was going to prison under the law? Were they the people the electorate intended to put away? And what was the effect of prison on them and on crime patterns? The news media cannot answer such critical questions without effective access to prisons and prisoners. Yet many reporters who tried to tell the stories of prisoners who ran afoul of the law’s inflexible, arithmetical criteria were thwarted by the state’s new, tougher interview restrictions. When reporters can’t get access to their subjects for interviews, the stories they would tell often remain untold. Policy debates are thus cut off from their informational roots. Several reporters have acknowledged abandoning projects on “third strikers” because of access restrictions.

There are, of course, many other reasons why citizens might want — or need — journalistically screened information that only prisoners possess. Issues that originate in prisons include the uses and limits of prison labor (the issue that got the San Diego prisoners sent to “the hole” for “impugning”). Some prisoners are uniquely qualified to enhance our understanding of corruption — governmental and otherwise — in the world outside; this is especially true of government officials who have been imprisoned for corruption and come to understand criminal justice issues from complementary perspectives, as both policy-makers and offenders. But surely it is in the setting of criminal penalties and the investigation of human rights abuses that prisoners’ information is of greatest use in a democracy.

One class of prisoners whose stories frequently cannot be told are those in heightened detention — in prisons-within-prisons often called “administrative segregation” but known colloquially as “solitary” or “the hole.” Prison officials say they place their toughest, most incorrigible convicts in administrative detention. Prisoners in these units have fewer visiting and telephone privileges than those in the general population, if they have any. Administrative segregation is often the first stop for those who have violated prison rules, but it is also a convenient place to “hide” prisoners who have objected to prison practices or had conflicts with staff members. In any other government institution, some of these in-house critics might be known as “whistle-blowers.” In the closed, airless world of prisons, they are written up for offenses and effectively isolated from fellow prisoners and the press. In some cases, the very offenses that got them sent to “ad seg” were contact with the news media to alert them to abuses or convey what, on the outside, would be constitutionally protected opinions on government programs. Such was the case with the San Diego prisoners suspected of “impugning” a prison program. Dannie Martin, a federal prisoner, was punished by a trip to administrative segregation for a story of his that I had published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Restrictions on journalistic access are especially onerous for reporters working in visual media — television and documentary films. If there’s no film or videotape, there’s no story. And increasingly, in states across the country, there is no film or tape because of stricter access restrictions. Connecticut, for example, allows no videotaped interviews and no transmission by any visual medium. Pennsylvania: no still or video cameras and no tape recorders. New Hampshire: no cameras, tape recorders or “videotaping machines.” South Carolina: No recording tools of any kind, including pencil and paper. Similar restrictions exist in other states.

If restrictions such as those had been in effect in Texas, the public would likely not have learned the full story of the wrongful conviction of Randall Adams for the killing of a police officer. Adams gained his freedom after documentary film maker Errol Morris brought the injustice to public attention in his now-celebrated film The Thin Blue Line.

There are many stories that simply can’t be told without use of a camera. When 60 Minutes aired an interview with a convict witness to a killing by prison guards at Corcoran prison — a witness whom they could interview only because he was in protective custody in a federal prison, where on-camera interviews were allowed — a key component of the story was an official prison video of the shooting. The interviewee pointed to the scene on a monitor, showing his position and those of the shooters and the shooting victim, Preston Tate. As the producer of the segment later noted wryly, “You can’t do [that] in print.” No camera, no story.

One reporter who has written many prison stories says that the barriers set up by the prison system are “a major disincentive to doing these stories.” He adds that “This is a big reason why not many reporters are doing these stories.” But it is not the only reason. The news media themselves must share some of the blame.

Just as many politicians have stoked public fears about crime and prisoners to serve their own electoral interests, so the news media often cater to and perpetuate the same fears to serve their commercial interests. With the news media increasingly concentrated in a few publicly traded megacorportions (many of them owned by conventional entertainment conglomerates) and under greater pressure to meet inflated profit goals comparable with growth stocks, they give undue emphasis to “what sells” — and fear sells.

Journalists are often pressured, too, to be entertaining, to cater to the lowest common denominator in order to boost the circulation and Nielsen ratings that translate into higher ad rates. Again, the effect is distortion of their purely journalistic focus — sometimes through news writing that is more colorful or simplistic than the circumstances of a story warrant; sometimes through excessive emphasis on rare or minor crimes or criminals and sometimes through suppression of prison stories altogether.

Prison officials in California and elsewhere have latched on to the increasing “entertainment” focus of the news media, using it improperly as a pretext to justify exclusionary policies for legitimate journalists. In recent years, at least two highly regarded news magazines have been informed that prison officials consider them entertainment shows. The New Hampshire Department of Corrections turned down a 60 Minutes interview for that reason, and California prison officials informed a producer for NBC’s Dateline that it was shows like his — “the next thing to tabloids” — that led to the system-wide ban on interviewing specified prisoners on camera. It would be illegal to base news interview restrictions on a department’s assessment of the program’s content, so California and many other states — using such innovative logic as California’s “inmate television stars” theory — have chosen to hobble television journalists by denying them the use of the cameras they need to effectively report stories involving individual prisoners.

Despite the illegitimate use that some prisons have made of this trend, the journalistic distortion of crime and prison for the purposes of ratings and profits is a serious social concern.

One of the effects of the trend toward a journalism that doubles as entertainment is the commodification of many prison stories. The news from the joint tends to reduce to certain presumably crowd-pleasing categories that serve as easily digestible substitutes for uncomfortable realities and soothing anesthetics for fears of social dislocation. You have your shocking-escape story, your monster-behind-bars story, your barbarian-riots story. Most such stories are based on actual prison occurrences, of course, but they are isolated and sensationalized to satisfy the same kind of illicit thrill some people presumably get from “action movies.” For ease of identification, they make use of stereotypes of the good-vs.-evil variety. The ultimate message to the consumer is “I’m OK; he’s not.”

Entertainment values are inherently non-journalistic. In entertainment, what we read or hear or see becomes important for the feelings with which it leaves us and not for its accuracy or importance. And nothing satisfies more readily than the easily understandable, the simple emotional reaction based on familiarity. In other words, stereotyping – that convenient shorthand by which we falsify experience — substitutes for news judgment.

Prison stereotypes remove all nuance from prisons and prisoners, underscoring the comforting notion that “we” have nothing in common with “them.” They underline the menacing violence of prison life and ignore the nobility and pathos that also characterize many prisoners, traits that are familiar to many lawyers, teachers, pastors and social workers who have spent a lot of time in these remote institutions.

Academic studies have documented that far greater journalistic attention has been devoted to crime at precisely the time when crime incidence actually declined. Journalists sum up the trend toward increasingly lurid TV news coverage with the adage, “If it bleeds, it leads” (leads off the broadcast). Prison stories, however — especially those that involve policy and not violence — are sometimes considered too dull or difficult to obtain to justify the expense necessary to cover them. That perpetuates the perception of prisons as places defined almost exclusively by violence. The horror stories of prison are widely known, but you are less likely to hear about prisoners who organize a drive to raise thousands of dollars for local child-abuse agencies, as a group of convicts did at one California prison. Nor is it likely to be explained to the reader or viewer that a high proportion of the nation’s prisoners had childhoods of extreme abuse. Such nuanced human stories are of less and less interest to journalists, both in the raucous, high-voltage world of television news and in the newspapers that seem determined to compete with them by adopting the worst of their techniques.

Sometimes the inability to cover prisons with any complexity results from individual journalists’ inability to see them with clarity. Many journalists are simply unable to imagine ways of looking at experiences that are not common in their own class or race. Yet, increasingly, imprisonment is becoming a matter of race and class. The populations of prisons are as poor and “minority” as newsroom populations are comfortable and white. Newspapers and other media have learned through error over recent decades how to cover some “minority” communities — largely the communities that their readers and viewers will bump into in the normal course of their lives. But they don’t have the incentive to make comparable efforts to cover communities that are as voiceless, politically powerless and invisible as those in our prisons. It’s one thing to try to understand the motivations and interests of the people who demonstrate at City Hall and quite another to empathize with poor, black or Hispanic dead-enders tucked into isolation cells in remote, rural prisons (as so many of them are). Nor is it easy to engage with — or even find — the families of those prisoners, who likely work long hours during the week and then trudge onto an all-night bus for a weekend visit with their loved one.

One can learn far more about crime and prisoners by spending time in the endless lines snaking into the visiting rooms of our jails and prisons than by spending an equivalent amount of time poring over budgets, academic reports or computer databases. But you won’t find many reporters on those prison lines. Not unexpectedly, reporters tend to cover the kinds of people they know and associate with daily, and much of their information — whether from casual news tips or carefully cultivated sources — also comes from people with whom they are comfortable socially.

Other obstacles to effective coverage are more institutional than individual. Budgets rarely include money for a prison beat. Journalists spend an inordinate amount of time covering crimes that take place in an instant; far less time covering the next step of the criminal justice system, the court trials that last days or, at most, weeks; and they devote virtually no time or resources to covering the jails and prisons where the convicted are psychologically transformed through months or years.

Another institutional bias is the market orientation of most media outlets. They are, after all, businesses, and the bottom line is more important to today’s news media than it has ever before. They hire consultants to tell them about market share and targeted advertising niches, but they don’t generally hire consultants to tell them how to unearth social truths. There is certainly a generalized commitment to truth-telling, but except in extraordinary times, few are the top news executives who view that commitment as more than a means to a marketing end.

In short, whether through social habit, conscious policy or business focus, the news media often end up mirroring politicians’ self-interested stereotyping of prisoners and prison issues.

The bulk of the media-consuming public — its attention directed and its perceptions shaped by journalistic coverage — appears to be comfortable with the substitution of simplistic stereotypes for the complex personal and social dynamics of prisons and prisoners. It is far easier to barricade one’s fears behind walls of concrete, rolls of razor wire and reams of cliché than to deal with the realities of criminal experience in our troubled society. But the people society has put out of sight and out of mind continue to exist, and they are shaped — or warped — by the conditions to which we have relegated them.

Crime reporting is our new mythology, and sometimes it becomes almost Homeric as it weaves its tapestries of high drama to enthrall readers presumably bored by weightier fare. Take, for example, the mythic recounting of a girl’s disappearance that ran on March 4, 1996, in the San Francisco Chronicle, datelined Hanford, Kings County. The page-one story began:

“This is one of those small towns where nothing really bad is ever supposed to happen.”

So far, nothing about the missing girl. The story continued:

“Shady parks and playgrounds are easy to find. Schools and churches stand quietly around every other corner. Lemoore Naval Air Station, where pilots fly F-18 jet fighters a few miles west of here, seems to provide a sense of security and order.”

Now, two paragraphs into the story, there is still no mention of that missing girl. It’s all yarn-spinning atmospherics – a safe, upstanding rural enclave, protected from the dangers posed by modern social complexities and unstable outsiders. Indeed, this 1950s-model world is comfortingly protected by jet fighters.

It’s not until the third paragraph that the reporter of this story finally alluded to the reason the story was being written:

“So when another girl disappears off the face of the earth – the third in the last two years from this area …”

Later in the story, the reporter reinforced his idealized portrait, but this time with a discordant rhetorical twist:

“This community in the central San Joaquin Valley between Highways 5 and 99 is a prosperous town, surrounded by endless farms where cotton, alfalfa, grapes and dairy cows are raised. The snow-capped Sierra is clearly visible 50 miles to the east after the morning fog burns off.

“But residents clearly are aware that it is also surrounded by a world where life is sometimes cheap. There are four prisons nearby, including Corcoran State Prison 17 miles south, where Charles Manson, mass murderer Juan Corona and Bobby Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, are housed.”

Needless to say, Charles Manson, Juan Corona and Sirhan Sirhan remained safely incarcerated and had nothing whatever to do with the girl’s disappearance. Nor did the prison itself, which is, as the story said, 17 miles from the town where the girl vanished. Those notorious criminals and their famed lockup are evoked to provide a kind of lurid frame for a story that is totally unrelated to them. In short, the story titillates rather than educates. It uses notorious prisoners and other mythic stereotypes to pander to and reinforce widespread public fears instead of informing with a valid sense of context.

In fact, the remote farm area where the girl’s disappearance occurred is no Eden. In some circles, it is as well known for its rural methamphetamine factories as for its cotton, alfalfa, grapes and cows. But that fact might have ruined a good yarn. Furthermore, the suspect finally arrested in the case was a resident of this devout town – the father of the victim’s 12- year-old playmate – and not an evil outsider preying on its 1950s innocence.

In ways such as this, journalists often uncritically accept distorted public attitudes and self-serving political agendas, and in the process further distort public perceptions of both crime and prisons. It’s an endless loop of misinformation and misunderstanding that’s as destructive in its way as overt censorship by prison authorities.

Perhaps both journalists and prison administrators could refresh their sense of their obligations to the public by reading the preamble to the Public Communications section of the policies and procedures of the Division of Prisons of North Carolina:

“Prisons are public institutions, operated at public expense for the protection of the public. All citizens of North Carolina have a right and a duty to know about conditions and operations of the State prison system. The governing authorities of this system desire to promote interest in and knowledge of our prisons and the care and treatment provided for the people in our custody. Our general policy is to facilitate access of the general public and mass media representatives to such knowledge by every practicable means, including visits to prisons and contacts with members of the State Correction Service and with the people in our custody. …”

No wonder some of the best prison reporting in recent years — such as much of the “Crime and Punishment” series aired on Nightline in the summer of 1998 — has been filmed in the prisons of North Carolina.

Whether the public is watching or not, it will be the public that must deal with the consequences of what happens in our nation’s prisons. And the only feasible way for most of them to watch is through the news media. They deserve better than what they’ve been getting — both from the custodians of these flawed institutions and from the journalists whose duty it is to investigate them.

]]>http://www.peterysussman.com/uncategorized/invisible-punishment-chapter/feed/0The March: A View From the Crowdhttp://www.peterysussman.com/blog/the-view-from-the-crowd/
http://www.peterysussman.com/blog/the-view-from-the-crowd/#commentsThu, 10 Jan 2013 07:41:51 +0000Peterhttp://www.peterysussman.com/?p=365Soon after graduating from college, I was privileged to be able to participate in an event that shaped and animated my life forever thereafter. Five decades ago this year, I participated in the March on Washington. In the old photos of the massive crowd around the Reflecting Pool in Washington, I’m one of the specks near the treeline, on the left of the pool when viewed from the Lincoln Memorial. In honor of the 50th anniversary in 2013, I put in writing the following recollections of that memorable day.

As I shuffled off sleepily in the predawn hours, it seemed a lonely, quixotic thing to do. My parents humored me, but it was clear they thought their 22-year-old son probably had more productive ways to spend a late summer day.

By that evening, the day’s events were already being read as an epochal moment in U.S. history.

The March on Washington today

The need to register our convictions was more potent than the expectation that anyone was listening

is so closely identified with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech that they seem like synonymous phenomena, and indeed the Rev. King’s words crystallized a movement and a moment as few other speeches in history have. From my foot soldier’s perspective, that eloquent vision was the emotional high point of the day, but in the end it was The March, not The Speech, that spoke loudest.

In the pre-dawn darkness of Aug. 28, 1963, accompanied by a college friend, I boarded a chartered bus on Long Island as a gesture of personal support for the civil rights movement that I knew mostly from newspapers and television news reports. The movement was primarily a Southern phenomenon at the time — sit-ins, bus boycotts and other demonstrations against maddeningly unjust and unconscionable local laws and practices. We were hoping to nationalize the movement, to spur the federal government to pass an array of civil rights and worker rights legislation that would at last put the full force of the government behind our national, moral and constitutional ideals.

This one-day roundtrip to Washington seemed to me at the time an important but probably futile exercise in moral witness. Few people in my circle of friends could see the point of it. And on the deserted streets of suburban, white, upper-middle-class Great Neck, N.Y., on that morning 50 years ago, the need to register our convictions was more potent than the expectation that anyone was listening. Like the other sleepy stragglers trudging aboard the bus, I just wanted to be counted.

It’s hard to propel oneself back into a historical moment – our views are inevitably colored by subsequent events – but let us try to recall that there had never been anything like the March on Washington; there was no model. Even the organizers struggled to characterize it. The marchers’ manual said, lamely, “The March on Washington projects a new concept of lobbying.” We have witnessed many massive marches in Washington in the intervening years – most notably anti-Vietnam war, pro-choice, gay-rights and Million Man marches. Although the 1963 gathering was formally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, to us then it was known – and it still is – as The March on Washington.

People from hamlets and cities around the country converged on Washington, clogging the highways in every direction, with common grievances and common convictions, determined to grab the attention of a government that didn’t seem to be taking seriously the moral outrage that I and so many others felt through my teenage years. The participants were of all races, regions, ages, religions and economic circumstances. Although many brave and principled people from the North had gone south to help topple the barriers erected by racism, the two cultures had not previously joined

At a rest stop on the pike, we began to sense for the first time the unfathomable dimensions of our pilgrimage

in massive numbers to mingle, express their common convictions and demand redress – and certainly not in the nation’s capital.

We did not know what to expect at the other end of our journey, and the first leg of the trip was hardly notable – one bus heading west and then south, on empty roads long before the morning commute. So it was with astonishment and a rush of collective excitement that I can feel to this day that, in the predawn half-light approaching the nearly deserted Holland Tunnel crossing to New Jersey, we spotted – several tollbooths away – a bus adorned with a banner that read, “Harlem CORE Marches on Washington.”

Another bus going to the same place! It was a stunning coincidence, a heartening confirmation of solidarity. We opened the windows and cheered and waved in the direction of the other bus.

On the turnpike, we soon spotted other buses – one here, one there, then clusters of them, some riding in tandem like families of motorized behemoths. At a rest stop on the pike, we began to sense for the first time the unfathomable dimensions of our pilgrimage: There were parked buses as far as one could see, endless rows of them spilling off the paved parking lot far out onto the grass apron. Temporary loudspeakers crackled out the names of groups as their buses were ready to depart. By the time we approached the outskirts of Washington, the highway appeared to be nothing but buses.

Entering the capital, we passed through some of the city’s poorest African American neighborhoods. The unbroken line of silver buses bedecked with banners seemed at times to overwhelm the shabby houses we passed that morning, but in front of those houses was a welcoming committee more moving than any tickertape parade. Local African American residents – children in front, adults behind them, many dressed in white shirts and Sunday suits – stretched in seemingly unbroken lines for miles, looking up and applauding each and every one of the thousands of buses that wheezed and snorted past them.

There were no words in our vocabulary to describe the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial. It stretched beyond our field of vision in every direction. We had gone there to be counted, but there were far too many to count on that sweltering August day. Some said there were a quarter of a million people; some said a million. It made little difference – there were clearly far more people than had ever done this before, and far more than the “over 100,000″ that organizers had ambitiously heralded in advance. With no previous historical markers by which to measure such events, the imagination could not wrap fully around what few facts were available.

Nor was there any sense of racial differences in that sea of like-minded people. To this day, I cannot give even the wildest estimate of the racial proportions of the crowd; I simply didn’t notice — in itself a notable fact in that especially race-conscious era. I was overwhelmed by a joyous utopian vision of a world I had never inhabited. Martin Luther King articulated the dream, but down below in the crowd, we experienced it.

It was happening on the streets of Washington. It could happen anywhere, anytime.

I remember little of the official program. There was a drone of speakers, often

They were applauding each and every one of the thousands of buses that wheezed and snorted past them

only half-heard from deep in the crowd. My friend and I were about to go off in search of a bite to eat. We were discussing whether that was even possible in such a crowd — and where we might find it — when a middle-aged woman in front of us overheard our conversation and remonstrated in a deep Southern drawl, “Honey, you can’t go now. Martin Luther King is about to speak.”

We knew the name, of course – we’d been reading about him for years in the newspapers – but at the time he was one in a succession of speakers, a great many of them with distinguished credentials and recognizable names, at a distant microphone.

We dutifully stuck around for what turned out to be the speech of the century.

… Let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. From every mountainside … LET FREEDOM RING!!’

The words were electric, and reflected the sense of national convergence that we felt out in the crowd. His words were still echoing in my ears many tired hours later as we debarked into the darkness on Northern Boulevard in Great Neck. But the words rang not just in our own ears. When I got home, my previously skeptical parents were waiting up late for me, buoyed themselves by the epic panorama that had dominated the evening newscasts. History had passed that way, and they wanted to talk about it, to share in it.

Martin Luther King’s inspired dream on Aug. 28, 1963, redefined and reinvigorated the American Dream, and hundreds of thousands of people lived out that dream symbolically on the streets of Washington. Many of us realized for the first time the power of individuals to add their numbers together to influence government policy, and we realized the power of an ideal whose time was long overdue.

Fifty years later, it’s still overdue, which is why it may help to relive that day for those who weren’t around. In an era of continuing racial injustice, advertent or otherwise, in voting booths, schools, courtrooms, prisons and elsewhere, we must rediscover the meaning of a community that extends beyond our own neighborhoods and races. My hope is that this anniversary will help reinvigorate the ideals for which we converged on Washington from all corners of the country.

It’s time for each of us, in our own places and circumstances, to get back on the bus.

]]>http://www.peterysussman.com/blog/the-view-from-the-crowd/feed/0The Other Hands on the Barrelhttp://www.peterysussman.com/blog/the-other-hands-on-the-barrel/
http://www.peterysussman.com/blog/the-other-hands-on-the-barrel/#commentsSun, 09 Jan 2011 08:19:57 +0000Peterhttp://www.peterysussman.com/?p=310Politicians and commentators have been quick to caution that the horrific shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and more than a dozen others was likely less a political act than the work of a deranged individual, and we’re sure to hear more such bromides in the days ahead.

It’s rubbish.

Those who are mentally unhinged act out their bizarre delusions in idiosyncratic and sometimes taboo or illegal ways, but they draw their vocabulary, their imagery and their preoccupations from their culture. However grotesquely distorted the expression, the reference points or cues are all around them … and us.

In shootings such as the one in Tucson, when there’s a long history of overtly violent political rhetoric and winking dare-yous, one young, possibly deranged man may pull the trigger, but there are many other, more respected hands on the barrel. Those “co-conspirators” in the Arizona shooting include Sarah Palin, her similarly extreme colleagues, the followers inflamed by their histrionics and the more circumspect politicians who have given her and the movement she represents their passive or active support to further their own careers.

That Sarah Palin put Representative Giffords in her crosshairs is not a matter of conjecture. This 2010 gaphic from her PAC’s website says it all:

We’d all like to believe our shared narrative of civil democratic discourse, but those who choose to further their careers with vitriolic, highly personal, even violent rhetoric and graphics and melodramatic theatrics must share the blame, if not the legal culpability, for the shooting that followed a tragically predictable course.

In the coming days, we can expect politicians andcommentators to try to stabilize the volatile mood by denying that this was a political conspiracy. The first one I heard edging in that direction was James Fallows on National Public Radio on Saturday afternoon, hours after the shooting. At the start of his remarks, Fallows emphasized, rightly, that “we just don’t know very much about the circumstances, who did it and for what reason.” Still, he had plenty to discuss.

Fallows acknowledged that “We have in the United States a long and unfortunately rich tradition of political violence. And on the one hand, any attack on a politician, it seems to me, is by definition political because that’s how that person came into public view.” But he adds:

“… it’s striking how often the motives for the crime seem to be obscure or really hard to connect to mainstream political activities.” And he harkens back to the shootings of Representative Leo Ryan (near Jonestown in Guyana), Governor George Wallace and Senator Robert Kennedy.

In summing up, Fallows says those shootings had “huge political consequences, but the motives seem as much a mental disorder or personal politics as anything else. And we don’t know how that will finally play out here.”

Although he mentions Palin’s poster suggesting violence (see above), his conclusion is not that “violence-tinged” rhetoric contributed to the Tucson shooting but that “perhaps there will be less of that tone” in the future.

And perhaps everyone will rally around bipartisan values and find a common language. And perhaps the Tea Party and its enablers will recognize that they need to be more measured in their future political rhetoric. And perhaps it will be 90 degrees in the shade in Washington, D.C., tomorrow.

For those of a more realistic bent, it’s important to recognize that those who will cover up this tragedy with a blanket of feel-good platitudes do a disservice to our country’s future. The role of journalists is not to help us feel good about ourselves.

It would be more helpful to the body politic if we point out that any such deadly act has complex but traceable roots in the culture as well as in the individual psyche. In this case the most visible roots are Sarah Palin herself, her angry allies and their inflamed, uncompromising “Don’t tread on me” rhetoric that at times is indistinguishable from neo-fascism; a large cadre of mainstream politicians who cynically condone such attitudes with carefully phrased euphemisms of support in order to win votes; permissive gun laws (and their primary sponsor, the National Rifle Association) that further the Wild West, gun-first, “I got my rights” culture; and the demagoguery against immigrants and other nonthreatening, hardworking social classes.

Helping to hide from view the dangerous dysfunctions — and outright immorality — of our political “discourse” are the commentators and politicians who will go to illogical lengths to persuade us that there is no real political dimension to this supposedly singular act of madness; that we’re OK, Jack, and everything will automatically rebalance itself quickly in this, the Greatest Democracy on Earth.

The police officer who arrested eminent Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is said to be an excellent and sensitive cop. He teaches a class in racial profiling. Here are a few discussion points he might want to add to the syllabus. They come from a white layperson who has written often about criminal justice issues and given a good deal of thought to the sort of ambiguous confrontation that led to Gates’ arrest.

These suggestions for the lesson plan are occasioned by the incident in which Gates became embroiled, but none is specifically intended as a comment on that case since there is no way for outsiders to accurately determine what occurred during the confrontation inside that house in Cambridge. They are advanced as points worthy of consideration in similar situations.

First lesson: If an officer arrests a citizen for an offense that is not the one he or she was investigating at the outset and arises solely from the officer’s interaction with the arrestee, then there is an extra burden of proof on the officer. When the arrest results from such a personal interaction, in the absence of imminently dangerous and overt threatening activity such as the brandishing of a weapon, it likely represents a subjective and suspect assessment on the officer’s part

There was no crime until the police presence itself created one.

and not a clear-cut violation of the law.

Second lesson: Officers who enter a home or a tense encounter suddenly, as most do at some point, must realize that their presence will heighten animosities that have no necessary relationship to illegal activity.

Third lesson (an elaboration of the second): People get angry. When angry enough, they are likely to swear or shout or verbally abuse the officers whose very presence sets off such outbursts. This anger and acting-out are understandable (albeit not commendable) emotional responses and are not an indication of illegal activity. It is not illegal to be angry or to shout. The First Amendment protects speech, and there is no law mandating citizen politeness to authorities. It is the officer’s duty to defuse tense situations with calming talk or such other means as would be helpful (see next lesson).

Fourth lesson: After the original cause for an encounter has been resolved — as it apparently was when Professor Gates proved he was the resident, not a burglar, in his own home — then the officer must urgently consider the friction his very presence is likely to engender … and leave the scene promptly. His or her job after the original reason for the encounter is resolved is to avoid escalation or the creation of a new issue.

Fifth lesson: Altogether too many people who have been cleared of suspicion in a crime are nevertheless arrested for resisting arrest or disturbing the peace or interfering with an officer in the performance of his or her duty. An officer’s hurt feelings may be legitimate and infuriating to him or her, but they are not an indication that a crime has been committed. The burden is on officers to do everything in their power not to incite such crimes or they become complicit in the infraction.

Sixth lesson (and the first to address race or class at all): When dealing with a member of a race or class with an ingrained distrust of police officers, based on past, individual police behavior or historical social-control practices — and even contemporary practices in some areas — it is incumbent on officers to understand the reasons for the residual hostility they are likely to encounter and take extraordinary measures to calm the resulting tensions peacefully and sensitively. Whether the distrust is merited in the circumstances of the current encounter is irrelevant.

Seventh lesson: When officers are white and suspects are not, there is an even greater chance that extraneous resentments may greet even the best-intentioned officer. It’s not fair that conscientious officers bear the burden of historical resentments engendered by others, but it is a fact that they must be prepared to address with a sensitivity that is based on imaginative as well as practical training techniques. They must be taught empathy, not just control, if they are to perform their duties equitably. And, once again, this is even more true when there is no longer evidence that a crime has been committed requiring any police presence.

Eighth lesson: With effective training comes a recognition that instinct is often suspect in dealing with “other” race and class groups, so methodical reasoning is all the more essential. For example, a reasonable assessment of a burglary suspect would certainly take into account that a middle-aged man who walks with the aid of a cane, wears rimless glasses and has a slight paunch — and no professional burglary tools in his possession — is most unlikely to be the culprit in a residential burglary. The burden of proof shifts to the officer, to prove his or her case.

These lessons are not a comprehensive list and they are not rules, but the kind of awareness they exemplify might have defused the tense Gates encounter short of arrest and would significantly reduce arrests of other innocent civilians nationally. Officers need to take continuing classes to familiarize themselves with the social divisions in a multicultural nation; they need to understand viscerally, not just intellectually, what their presence represents to others. Unless the police department itself is diverse, individual officers will not develop the deep cultural understanding they need to fulfill their professional responsibilities.

In the broader picture, Professor Gates’ reported anger and hostility are unfortunate but irrelevant. There was no crime until the police presence itself created one. Therein lies an urgent problem that law enforcement must address … urgently.

Meg Whitman has a problem with our right to marry, but it’s not at all clear what that problem is.

The billionaire former eBay boss, now running as a Republican for governor, spoke to a gathering of “high-profile high-tech Silicon Valley women,” reported Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik. According to Garchik’s source, Whitman said she’d voted for Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, based on her religious convictions and her emotions.

Whitman added, as if to stake out an “above-the-fray” compromise position: “You know, I just wish there were one term for everything: civil unions.”

Here’s where I started getting lost, because there is currently

I won’t interfere in their religious affairs. I ask only that they don’t interfere in our civil affairs.

”one term for everything.” It’s called “marriage.”

For some reason, Whitman apparently prefers her own “term for everything,” as a substitute for the one that has been universally recognized for ages, in this country and elsewhere.

Under Whitman’s system, Garchik reports, “government would grant civil licenses only. It would be up to individual churches to decide who they would marry.”

Again, that’s the current system exactly: Government grants civil licenses, called marriage licenses. They are civil documents only, with no religious significance whatsoever. If churches wish to perform their own rituals using the civil marriage license, they are welcome to, and most have chosen to do so. They are free to perform that ritual for any gender combinations they wish. Civil authorities have no right under the Constitution to control how churches use the civil license in their rituals.

Similarly, couples who wish to be married outside a church, using the same civil marriage license, are entitled to do so, receiving the same civil benefits and responsibilities as those who “consecrate” their marriages in a religious institution.

Whitman’s essential point seems to be that, although she wants to retain the nationally recognized civil license, she objects to it being called what it’s always been called: a marriage license. She apparently wants all of us who were married years ago, as well as those who will be married in the future, to change the name of the license that was or will be issued for us. Why? Is she trying to disrupt traditional marriages like mine by changing the name of the license that first bound us legally and gave us and our children certain civil rights, privileges and obligations?

If any religious denominations want to discriminate against same-sex couples in their religious rituals, that is their right. However, it is everyone’s right, including same-sex couples, to have equal access to the same civil marriage license that my wife and I had when we were married 38 years ago.

I see no reason why churches should be allowed to expropriate for their exclusive use the term that civil authorities have used for their license for centuries: a marriage license. If that name is too tainted for people in Whitman’s church, they are free to change the name they use in their rituals. “Holy matrimony,” perhaps? Whatever; it’s their choice. I won’t interfere in their religious affairs. I ask only that they don’t interfere in our civil affairs.

Huffington Post is a noble and necessary experiment in citizen journalism — and indeed in journalism itself — and I have been pleased to be a contributor, however infrequent. But like all path-breaking experiments, it can be led astray by its very success, and I wonder if it is now in danger of being blinded by the dazzle of one of its own innovations.

Citizen journalists at Huffington Post recently received an email crowing, understandably, that “More than 2,500 of you helped make our tea party coverage the biggest distributive reporting success since the election.” As evidence of that success, the email noted that Huffington Post‘s citizen journalism “caught the eye of the blogosphere, on both conservatives and progressives [sic]. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was among those watching your reports, broadcasting your photographs live on her show last Friday.”

Attention garnered is certainly one measure of success, but is that the best measure of journalism excellence? Is the volume of the reporting an adequate gauge of good journalism?

To get more specific: Should we not also ask whether the high-wattage attention focused on a series of fringe protests dreamed up by some p.r. wizard with an ideological agenda by itself distorted the importance of those protests?

Too often, in this celebrity-crazed nation, the attention paid to a subject is both self-justifying and self-reinforcing, and many of the errors of the mainstream media — even on issues far more important than a blonde beauty’s latest drunk-driving arrest — follow a similarly dangerous trajectory. That is,

Too often, in this celebrity-crazed nation, the attention paid to a subject is both self-justifying and self-reinforcing …

the unrelenting attention of “pack journalists” gives a credibility and importance to an event that it did not merit. (The reverse is also true: The paucity of attention paid to a topic marginalizes that topic and can help push it down to the bottom of the national agenda.)

The spin may vary from one news organization to another — one cable channel to another — but the attention itself may be what most people remember though it can be every bit as misleading as the crazed rant of a verbal bully posing as a journalist. (“Of course it’s important; it was the top story on the 6 o’clock network news.”) It is a symptom of the perversity of the human mindthat, as social scientists have argued, even the repetition necessary to debunk a myth can give it a measure of credibility, by the sheer act of repetition alone.

Examples are easy to find in the mainstream media, on issues of supreme importance — from Saddam Hussein’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks to the prevalence of the most recent headline-hogging crime. Misleading or not, stories like those have lasting impact in the real world: Hussein’s inflated “guilt” was a key part of the narrative furthering the war in Iraq, and those crime-of-the-moment stories often lead to ad hoc legislation that further distorts our crazy quilt of criminal sanctions.

All too often, such saturation coverage conditions public sentiment for quick and easy solutions. Those solutions may be as specific as “remedial” legislation or as general as the validation of “conventional wisdom” or as stubbornly pernicious as the reinforcement of racial, class and other stereotypes.

All of this may seem like a heavy burden to place on the coverage of an inconsequential fringe event like the “tea party” protests, but the level of coverage was not inconsequential.

Journalism is essentially anecdotal. Such coverage reinforces the reservoirs of anecdotal knowledge from which most of us draw our policy conclusions. In this instance, the public was likely to conclude from the attention paid to these p.r.-driven pseudo-events that the prevailing mood of the country has swung to angry grassroots advocacy of balanced budgets, lowered taxes and a reduced role for the federal government in financing systemic reforms of healthcare, the economy and the environment. There is no evidence that that is true, despite the excessive attention paid to a bunch of people at isolated locales parading around in tea-bag hats.

So what’s the antidote? Citizen journalism certainly has a valuable role to play in leavening news coverage with local perspectives and with the insights of experts outside the “usual suspects” featured on Sunday morning news shows. But massive, unfiltered exercises in citizen journalism can tilt public understanding as surely as the rush of passengers from one side to the other can threaten the stability of a small boat.

I used the word unfiltered intentionally. Despite the scorn heaped on the role of the MSM as filters of the information that reaches the public, we may be losing something important by so completely ditching the old model. The solution for information that has been inappropriately filtered may not be opening the spigot full-force.

Another word for journalism filters is editors. They are critical to the process of shaping the chaos of public events into some coherent form, including a rough hierarchy based on importance. Without them we are left with little more than the accumulation of data measured more by volume than significance.

By all means, let’s keep the citizens in citizen journalism. Let any interested reader find the raw data from hundreds of localities if they wish. But the measure of our success should be the perspective and understanding we provided for our readers, not how much data was accumulated by how many people or how much of it reverberated elsewhere in the national news echo chamber.

]]>http://www.peterysussman.com/blog/take-me-to-your-editor/feed/1The Politics of Outragehttp://www.peterysussman.com/blog/the-politics-of-outrage/
http://www.peterysussman.com/blog/the-politics-of-outrage/#commentsWed, 06 May 2009 03:42:53 +0000Peterhttp://www.peterysussman.com/?p=191On Friday, May 1, 2009, the following was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, under the headline “Formulas for Dysfunction: On the Effects of Direct Democracy.” At the time, I suppose, it was technically an OpEd, not a blog post, but my republishing it in this space magically transforms it into a blog post. That’s just one of the wonders of redefinition possible online.

Of course, feeling the need to define its category before posting it under the heading “Previous Blogs” also betrays the mild discomfort of a longtime print journalist dipping his toes into the blogosphere.

* * *

For decades the voters of California have been freezing their peeves of the moment into constitutional permanence. Now the state’s voters are asked to solve the ensuing budgetary mess by once again creating a rigid, permanent constitutional fix for a transient fiscal crisis. Before Proposition 1A becomes yet another failed experiment in the politics of outrage, we should examine the dynamic that has brought us to our current fiscal impasse.

Among the primary culprits in restricting our ability to respond to extraordinary economic pressures are three constitutional mandates approved by the voters long ago that have placed legislators in a straitjacket as they try to resolve the pressure of extraordinary spending burdens and plummeting revenues brought on by the current depression.

The three measures most directly tying legislators’ hands are Proposition 13, which permanently distorts our tax base; the three-strikes initiative, which promotes unsustainable growth in our expensive prison system; and the two-thirds budget vote requirement that restricts legislators’ ability to respond to the other two pressures. Let’s review them briefly:

Proposition 13, a 1978 measure that was billed as the “homeowners’ tax revolt,” has ironically shifted more of the tax burden from businesses to homeowners. Its rigid formula for property assessment and taxation capped property taxes by an arbitrary numerical formula; starved many local services such as fire departments, police, schools and libraries; and generally tied revenue allocation into such knots that legislators and local officials had to raid other kitties to fund functions once financed by property taxes.

It also set a two-thirds vote requirement for legislative and local tax increases. Over the years, it has perpetuated – and even worsened – inequities among neighboring property owners and helped fuel a sense of

It’s a budgetary cure in the same sense that drinking a morning eye-opener will fix an alcoholic hangover.

the irrational burdens of taxation.

The three-strikes mandate, passed by voters in 1994, took many criminal sanctions out of the hands of judges and other professionals and subjected the nuanced art of sentencing to – once again – rigid arithmetic formulas that fail to reflect the gravity of the crime, the degree of individual culpability or the possibility of human change or rehabilitation. As a result, California has become one of the global capitals of lifetime incarceration, resulting in an ever-more-bloated prison system of increasingly geriatric (hence inordinately expensive), unthreatening prisoners.

The two-thirds budget vote mandate (with origins in Proposition 1 in 1933, during the mother of all depressions), combined with a polarized political system, has forced legislators to achieve virtual unanimity to resolve complicated budget problems. Politics and

governance are, above all, the arts of compromise and coalition-building. The two-thirds vote requirement and partisan ideological purity, whether on taxes or on spending, have made compromise and coalition-building next to impossible.

Certainly other factors contributed to our current fiscal stalemate – including the loss of institutional memory and personal working relationships in Sacramento caused by yet another voter mandate, term limits (Proposition 140, passed in 1990). But what the three constitutional measures emphasized here have in common are their profound effect on the governance of this large state and their inflexible, permanent dictates driven by transitory voter outrage that was stoked by political opportunists.

One-size-fits-all formulas virtually never solve the problems they were designed to, and they create unforeseen problems that restrict the options available to future generations confronting changed circumstances. But the simplistic political messages that gave birth to such measures endow them with an almost religious validity that insulates them from future revision as unforeseen circumstances demand.

So how are we asked to solve such dislocations in our body politic in 2009? With yet another arbitrary solution imposed on future generations: Proposition 1A, which creates a rigid budgetary process embedded, yet again, in the concrete of arithmetic benchmarks. It’s a budgetary cure in the same sense that drinking a morning eye-opener will fix an alcoholic hangover.

It is certainly understandable that beleaguered Californians, with falling incomes, uncertain employment status and heavy housing burdens, would be fearful for the future. It is fear that drives the politics of outrage. “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

Before we react out of anger and fear to endorse permanent mandates for our descendants – mandates dreamed up under midnight deadline pressure by legislators who were incapable of coalitions and compromises – let’s vote to amend or repeal the previous arbitrary, voter-approved solutions that got us into this mess: our ungainly prison system, our dysfunctional political process and our rigid tax structure.

The invitation to join SFGate’s new corps of bloggers called City Brights offers the opportunity to reach a substantial audience, a prospect no journalist or professional writer turns down easily. But it carries troubling implications.

The Gate, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, compensates its bloggers in the currency of the web, hits and links, instead of dollars and cents, which is how writers used to be compensated for similar commentaries on the Chronicle’s OpEd page. “Hits and links” is another way of saying “for free,” and blogging for free for a news business that has just announced plans to lay off or buy out scores of paid staff journalists feels uncomfortably like scabbing.

What the Gate is offering its bloggers is the norm in the online world, but the timing of its offer is fraught with irony. The Chronicle is in deep trouble, groaning under accumulated losses caused, in part, by

Blogging for free for a news business that has just announced plans to lay off or buy out scores of paid staff journalists feels uncomfortably like scabbing.

competition from online sites, including its own.

The Gate will increasingly serve as the Chronicle’s face to the world, and if the paper folds, as currently appears possible, the web site may well be its only outlet. My blogging colleagues’ distinguished credentials notwithstanding, the Gate will likely substitute some of the amateurs’ free musings for the more informed, better researched news and analysis published in the newspaper. One-shot flashes of emotion and insight can never adequately replace the professional journalist’s persistent but less glamorous news coverage, day in and day out.

“Information wants to be free” is the Net’s rallying cry, but the traditional content providers and their families expect real remuneration for their labors. As for the readers … well, you get what you pay for.

Therein lies the tragedy of American journalism today. It’s a tragedy both for journalists, who were able to earn a living by holding a mirror up to their world, and for the nation that relied on those newspapers, however misguided at times, to help establish our communal agenda and provide much of the data by which we (bloggers and the rest of us) could define our culture and assess the operation of our governments. Even for its critics, in whose ranks I often found myself, the Chronicle has been the closest institution we have to an area-wide forum. It was a place where — in potential, if not always in execution — this gloriously diverse and inventive area could show it has more in common than a shared spot on the map.

The Chronicle served as an uncompensated wholesaler. Other local news media — including those on the web — based much of their local news coverage on what they read in the Chronicle. In the media food chain nationally, commentary, which makes up an ever larger share of our online diet, feeds on news stories usually developed by print journalists. As those print publications cut back and, increasingly, go out of business, the bloggers will be feeding on an ever more impoverished diet.

The Chronicle, like most other newspapers, has handled poorly the transition from print-only to a more varied information environment. Overwhelmed by an epochal information revolution — and often burdened by the debts of acquisitive media conglomerates — newspapers seem intent on acting out to the final curtain an outmoded economic model.

I share the sadness of those who mourn the layoff-by-layoff decline and potential demise of the Chronicle, more for what the newspaper sometimes has been and what it could have become than for what it seems fated to be with a fraction of its news staff.

Without the Chronicle, and barring the emergence of an independent, local white knight or a new killer app for

In the end what emerges from an excessive reliance on amateurs is still amateurish.

news, the people who live here will have to subsist increasingly on McNews — perhaps served up by short-order cooks at a franchised fast-food outlet like Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group. The MediaNews chain has already gobbled up most of the local suburban newspapers and seems intent on realizing “economies of scale” by pruning staff and publishing the same generic, centrally edited news stories in all its local papers. MediaNews appears to be the ultimate beneficiary of a monopoly exemption favored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The disappearance of the dominant metro paper is likely to atomize the local population further into islands of special interest, probably in the form of competing and little-trafficked web sites, each with its own formula, bias, subject areas and constituency.

Those of us who have felt that too few local voices — of all races, interests and income levels — were reflected in the Chronicle must now face the prospect that without the paper we will have convenient, common access to still fewer voices. Although those voices will find expression somewhere on the web or in print, we will lose the forum where they could most constructively meet.

The cult of the amateur blogger is satisfying to the amateur — and in many ways informative for the reader. Amateurs serve as a crucial check on the corps of officially sanctioned “authorities,” and many have undeniably useful expertise. I celebrate the two-way pipeline that the Net facilitates. But few bloggers have the resources to research stories in far-flung areas or to dig deeply into affairs of state and local governance. In the end what emerges from an excessive reliance on amateurs is still amateurish.

I start my SFGate blogging with the hope that more of us will realize that we have a stake in the Chronicle’s survival and the retention of as many as possible of its skilled professionals. And I hope that both the newspaper and its web site come to realize that they stand a better chance of thriving by engaging openly with the community in devising strategies to preserve what used to call itself “The Voice of the West.”

Ultimately, the solution to newspapers’ woes, both locally and nationally, lies in finding new ways of merging print and web, new ways of becoming relevant and essential to their communities and new ways of “monetizing” news and informed analysis, not in “demonetizing” those who provide it.